Obama wants revised Afghan war options

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-11-12 16:53

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama won't accept any of the Afghanistan war options before him without changes, a senior administration official said, as concerns soar over the ability of the Afghan government to secure its own country one day.

In this image released by the White House, President Barack Obama meets with his national security team to discuss Afghanistan in Situation Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2009. [Agencies]

Obama's stance comes as his own ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, is voicing strong dissent about a US troop increase, according to a second administration official.

Eikenberry's misgivings center on a concern that bolstering the American presence in Afghanistan could make the country more reliant on the US, not less. He expressed them in forcefully worded cables to Washington just ahead of Obama's latest war meeting Wednesday.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss administration deliberations.

The developments underscore US skepticism about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose government has been dogged by corruption. The emerging administration message is that Obama will not do anything to lock in an open-ended US commitment.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that she is concerned about Afghanistan's "corruption, lack of transparency, poor governance (and) absence of the rule of law."

"We're looking to President Karzai as he forms a new government to take action that will demonstrate - not just to the international community but first and foremost to his own people - that his second term will respond the needs that are so manifest," Clinton said during a news conference in Manila with Philippine Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo.

Obama is still expected to send in more troops to bolster a deteriorating war effort.

He remains close to announcing his revamped war strategy - troops are just one component - and probably will do so shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends Nov. 19.

Yet in Wednesday's pivotal war council meeting, Obama wasn't satisfied with any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, one official said.

The president instead pushed for revisions to clarify how and when US troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. In turn, that could change the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official.

Military officials said Obama has asked for a rewrite before and resisted what one official called a one-way highway toward war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations for more troops. The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama's resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely.

The president is considering options that include adding 30,000 or more US forces to take on the Taliban in key areas of Afghanistan and to buy time for the Afghan government's small and ill-equipped fighting forces to take over. The other three options on the table are ranges of troop increases, from a relatively small addition of forces to the roughly 40,000 that McChrystal prefers, according to military and other officials.

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